Real world Giga/Halion comparison

[donnie]

I just recently got Halion and decided to do a polyphony comparision between the two programs.

I took a midi that I had done in Giga that pushed Giga to the max (160 notes). Once you reach the max in giga you start to get popping in the audio.

I then loaded the midi file in Cubase and loaded one Halion with the same instruments that were on giga.

I moved the polphony slider all the way to 256 and it easily played all the notes without choking.

I then decided to copy my midi channels and add another instance of Halion with 16 more midi channels. This pushed the CPU meter to around 90% and I had a few glitches.

However it is important to note that I was probably in the neighborhood of 400-500 notes of polyphony!

It will be interesting to see if when giga increases the amount of polyphony if it will get the same performance.

My system:

1.2 ghz Athlon
768 megs of RAM
pulling off a 18 gig SCSI 160

Donnie

[Simon Ravn]

Sounds interesting Donnie! So my question would be... How well does Halion import gigs? Is it flawless? Everything works - keyswitching, modulation sample changes etc? And stability?

[gigaDiga]

I have had to ban sustains from my compositions. The reason why is perfectly exhibited in the fact that, once again, last night I was happily playing away on a electric piano patch, forgetting it was coming from GigaStudio..... suddenly, after a few bars, clicks and pops lept out at me, weird erroneous notes jingled and jangled and the whole machine died.....

all that from keeping the sustain pedal held too long.

[Neal Keane]

Giga,
My jazz ensemble director used to forcefully kick my foot off the sustain pedal while I was blissfully playing away. Maybe its Nemesys\'s way of breaking our heavy pedal habits. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif
Neal

[gigaDiga]

I must confess Neal... you\'re right there was some quite excessive sustain going on last night. But I\'ve a couple of compositions where I\'m looking to create that cloudy harmonic mess which results from such excessive use of the sustain pedal... neatness no... wall of sound yes. Hence krrrplonk dead machine hmmm reach for reboot. I\'ve tried mimicing this through reverb but that just sounds like reverb... plus it\'d be a real bonus to just be able to play it live straight from giga.

Thanks for the thought tho http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/wink.gif

[clueless]

Just another data point -- when I hit the 160 note limit, no clicks or pops. The note stealing algorithm takes over.

clueless

[Doug Marshall]

Yes, note stealing at about 160 is pretty clean. However, if you happen to flood Giga with a lot more than 160 notes Giga performance really crumbles. The note stealing becomes audible with loud ticks and response overall becomes erratic. Substantial latency and notes that hang on after keys are released are common if you really push beyond the limits. Does anyone remember how remarkably smooth the old K250\'s note stealing was? You could get an awful lot out of a mere 12 notes! Not that I\'m suggesting we go back. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/wink.gif